City & Guilds

City & Guilds is a United Kingdom examining and accreditation body for vocational, managerial and engineering training. It was founded in 1878, and the purpose of their event was to shift the culture to keep up with the accelerating, changing world that they are doing business in. They heard about Face The Music as innovation specialists, and thought that bringing us in was a great way for them to walk their talk around making changes and doing things differently.

The scene was the East Wintergarden in the Canary Wharf district of London, an innovative venue itself⎯a six-story glass arch, right on the piers.

They had about 130 participants, and wanted the event to be a springboard to a change in culture and the line in the sand after which a new way of operating kicked in. Our design featured elements that kept the participants challenged while supporting them and providing the tools to be successful.

The framework for the discussions was what the CEO, Chris Jones, called orthodoxies (institutionalized ways of being and doing business), and discontinuities (factors from the environment, market, or other influences that are disturbing the established City & Guilds orthodoxies. Our design called for a comprehensive identification of the various orthodoxies generated by the participants brainstorming in teams. Each team had one of the board members sitting in, and a facilitator.

After a short introduction to the guidelines of brainstorming, the teams were off and running. The process provided an opportunity to get a wide variety of data generated by the teams, and that data being culled down into themes, and prioritized by how big of an impact each was having on the business.

Each brainstorming team chose the two or three orthodoxies they thought were most important, and then identified the discontinuities that are currently impacting City & Guilds. They proceeded to group the discontinuities by type or theme, and prioritize which they though were having the greatest impact on the organization. This process created a lot of data for everyone to consider as they looked into what changes were going to be needed going forward.

After all this heady work, it was time to shift gears into a different modality⎯each brainstorming team became a “band,” and we led them through a process where they chose their most important orthodoxy, and wrote a song about it and its attendant discontinuities. For some of the participants, this was truly outside of their comfort zone, but the enthusiasm shown by others, and some timely facilitation got all the groups on track. As the process went on you could feel the energy in the room ramp up, and hear the groups laughing and starting to sing their songs.

The culmination was showtime. We gathered everyone back together, and got them ready to perform. Now the excitement was full blown! We called up the first group: Rabbi B. and the Innovators singing “Decisions are Good.” Other performances included the Sassy City Shifters, the Culture Vultures, and the Screamin’ SAP’s. The groups and the audience really had a great time with it, and I could see the CEO and the HR Director smiling. They shared afterward that this was exactly the kind of shift they were looking for, new ideas, enthusiasm and animation around the work they were doing, and energy going forward toward making it happen.

As the rest of the FTM band played a cocktail set afterward, I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of appreciation and excitement from the participants about the day they had there at Canary Wharf.